


You Know What They Say About Derry

by SouthwoodPlantation



Category: IT - Stephen King
Genre: Combined canon from novel and film, Fix-It, Just a little tribute to the slew of missing Derry kids tbh, M/M, Sometimes a family is a bunch of traumatized adults and some creepy kids they found in the sewer, These kids are woke in more ways than one, everyone deserved better
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-22
Updated: 2019-09-22
Packaged: 2020-10-26 06:43:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20737913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SouthwoodPlantation/pseuds/SouthwoodPlantation
Summary: “Please. If you love him,” she says, grave and unblinking, “let us help him.”(In which the present-day missing kids have something to say on the matter.)





	You Know What They Say About Derry

From the creature’s shrunken, quivering body, the Losers pull its palpitating heart. They make one righteous fist with all their hands and crush it. The light drains from its eyes; it unmakes itself into ash, into nothing.

_In another vein of the catacombs, several figures suspended in mid-air cease to be suspended. At some sudden cue they drop to the stone floor, gasping. Surfacing. The color comes back to their faces. They’re kids, some of them very small, others toeing the deep end of their teenage years. _

_They turn to look at each other in the shadows, knowing what they now know, which is – well, it’s nearly everything. They take only a brief moment to collect themselves before they’re making their way on numb legs and feet toward the sounds of commotion in another part of the cave._

Richie Tozier is clinging to his best friend’s limp body. He’s wide-eyed with panic and the sound inside his head is grating and shrill as microphone feedback.

“We can still help him,” he hears himself say, distantly. “Guys, he’s fine – we can still help him!” 

The others stand over him, shifting their weight, slow tears streaking the muck on their cheeks. “Richie,” someone says – Beverly? – and it’s clear now that there is one more horror they’ll have to face: pulling a screaming Richie from Eddie’s corpse. 

That’s when they hear it. A hurried procession of bare feet and sneaker soles into the opening of the cave. Sandals clapping lightly against little heels.

Everyone but Richie turns to look, and what they see is a small army of young people advancing on them, eyes glinting like a nocturnal creature’s. Bev may be the only one to realize, to intuit, that these kids have been in the deadlights. They’ve been there a long time.

At the head of the group is a girl of maybe seventeen, shoeless and wispy-looking in an enormous t-shirt and cartoon pajama pants. Her hair is black and soaked with rancid water. Locks of it are pasted to her brow, her jaw. Behind her are teenagers in fast food visors, children in nightgowns and baseball uniforms.

“Who are you?” Bill starts, but Mike murmurs the answer, almost to himself:

_The missing kids._

“Friends,” says one of the boys, still in his elbow pads from the skate park, a thin blush of acne across his nose and cheeks. “Don’t worry about it.”

It’s only when the girl rushes to Richie’s side that he looks up from Eddie’s bloodied face. 

“The clown got him?” She asks, voice low and hoarse with disuse. 

Richie chokes out another sob. He nods. The girl nods too.

“Okay,” she says, staring into the dark of Eddie’s gored torso, doing some inscrutable calculation in her mind. “Okay. We can fix this.” 

Richie stares at her, still trembling in shock. The other Losers steal hesitant glances at one another.

She turns to face the rest of them and repeats, “We can fix this.” 

Eddie is undoubtedly dead, gone, lost. But there’s a sober firmness to the girl’s voice, and a mute, knowing look on the faces of the other children, and the Losers can’t bring themselves to argue.

The boy with the elbow pads joins the girl at Richie’s side, the two of them flanking him with an unexpected protectiveness.

“Richie,” he says, and before Richie’s mouth can form the words _How do you know my name?_ the boy continues, “we have to take him to another part of the cistern. But we can help.”

Richie’s grip tightens on Eddie’s shoulders. Watching him vanish down a dark corridor, leaving his body in the care of these strange milk carton kids? It would be a second death. 

The cavern gives a groaning sound and darkens. Rubble begins to pour from the walls, followed by larger stones. Neibolt is collapsing.

The girl turns to Richie with a renewed urgency.

“Please. If you love him,” she says, grave and unblinking, “let us help him.”

_Love him._ She says it like a code phrase, a turning key. None of its gravity is lost in translation. Richie, bewildered, relents and withdraws from Eddie. 

Almost immediately, the kids advance and lift his body from the floor. Ben is reminded, in some far-off way, of the game they used to play at sleepovers. _Light as a feather, stiff as a board._

“This place won’t last much longer,” the boy warns the remaining Losers. “Hurry and go back up the way you came. We know another way; wait for us on the surface.”

“Are you sure…?” Bill calls after them. That what? That they’ll be safe, that they’ll be able to help Eddie?

The girl seems unconcerned with the second half of his question. With what looks almost like a smile, she shoots back, “You’ve had weirder things happen, right?”

Up on Neibolt Street, the ground where the Losers stand is quaking. They huddle together, caught between the impulse to celebrate and the need to grieve. Already, parts of the house’s foundation have given way.

Richie in particular is motionless, almost catatonic. His shirt is ruined with Eddie’s blood. His glasses are cracked and soiled too. What had he said, in that weak, fading voice? _Richie, you know I…_

Fuck him, Richie thinks. Fuck him, that son of a bitch, why say anything? Why start to confess _anything,_ just to leave it hanging there in the damp subterranean air, in the cold wash of the deadlights? Damn him, but most of all damn himself, for talking Eddie into coming. Since day one, that’s what he’d been doing, talking the guy into tagging along, dragging him places he never should have been. And now look what’s happened. It’s not just one of his pseudo-asthma attacks this time, no, not even a broken arm, it’s more final than that; Eddie is… he’s – 

The sewer grate lifts up from the asphalt, breaking the silence with the squeal of rusted metal. Up from the depths comes the barefoot girl, breathing hard, even grimier than before.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she says, reaching down into the ground to lend a blood-encrusted hand, “Eddie Kaspbrak.” 

And with that, she hoists a coughing, exasperated Eddie into the light of day.

Richie’s vision explodes white like a star. Adrenaline, pure adrenaline. In this startling blankness he rushes Eddie, nearly knocking them both to the ground in his haste. Frantically he touches him all over, cupping his face, tapping his arms and stomach and chest – everything accounted for. Everything intact. Eddie doesn’t even wince when Richie presses his palm to the place where Pennywise split him apart. He just leans in, buries his face in Richie’s shoulder.

The others are quick to embrace him, enclosing Richie too, who seems unwilling to take his hands off of Eddie ever again. 

“I thought I –” Richie starts, voice already giving out. 

Eddie cuts him off. “How about a thank you? I saved your ass down there.”

Richie laughs, or he sobs, it doesn’t matter which; the feeling is the same. It warrants both.

“Thank you,” he says, first lowly into Eddie’s ear, and then louder. To the rest of his friends. “Thank you.”

But he’s forgetting someone. In his periphery, Richie can see the missing girl and boy smiling, enjoying the sunshine. The rest of the children file up and out of the sewer. They look up at the sky, and to the reunited Losers, unsure of which warmth they’d rather bask in at the moment. Richie is able to tear himself from Eddie just long enough to join the kids. 

“Thank you,” he repeats, kneeling and drawing the oldest two into a sudden hug. He looks to the others, extends the sentiment. “I don’t know what kind of weird cave children you are, but I’m paying for your college tuition. Or – fucking – something. We’ll work the details out later.”

Mike’s hand is mid-ruffle in Eddie’s hair when he asks the kids, beaming, “How did you do this?”

“You know what they say about Derry,” the girl says, with a sympathetic glance towards Beverly. “Nobody who dies here ever really dies.”

“Buy us lunch and we’ll explain everything,” adds the boy.

Fair enough, they all agree. Bill hoists the smallest boy, drowsy and freckled, onto his hip and carries him as they make their way up the street. Mike begins good-naturedly interrogating a few of the older ones about the lair, about Derry, about It. They’ll all need to compare notes, when this has died down. No one turns back to watch the ground yawn open and swallow the Neibolt house. 

Richie and Eddie lag a little bit behind the group, Richie’s arm slung comfortably over his friend’s shoulders.

“Nothing like getting murdered to make me reevaluate my entire goddamn life,” Eddie’s saying, shaking his head. 

“Oh yeah?” Richie teases. “You did a risk assessment on it?”

“Like you wouldn’t believe. All my meds, my job, my marriage. What the fuck have I been doing? My life flashed before my eyes and I couldn’t tell Myra apart from my fucking mom.”

Richie wants to give him hell for that, but first he needs to catch his breath. Let it sink in, consider the implications. While he’s deciding how to respond, the barefoot girl slows her pace to join them. She beckons Richie to lean down. Cups her hands to whisper something. 

“You’ll feel better if you tell him,” she says.

Richie looks at her. His mouth goes dry; he might throw up.

The girl holds his gaze, but there’s no malice in it. No threat. She reaches down and squeezes his hand.

Maybe it’s because she saw them all in the deadlights. Maybe it’s because she watched him cling to Eddie’s body. Or maybe she’s just young, forged in a different time. Whatever it is, Richie knows two things: that she and her kind bear him no ill will, and that she is completely right. She whispered not because she shares his shame, but because he has to be the one to cast the fear aside.

_This kills monsters._

He gives the girl’s hand a squeeze in return, lets her catch up with the others. Eddie didn’t even seem to notice the aside, as he’s rolled up his shirt and is examining his unscathed abdomen. Fuck, Richie thinks, did _everyone_ get toned while they were apart?

“Hey, Eds, I really gotta talk to you one-on-one after we all get cleaned up, man.”

Eddie looks at his shoes. He smiles.

“Oh, yeah. That’s right,” he says. “I have a thought I need to finish.”

Richie’s blood rushes upstream, burns in his face. It’s a lovely feeling. A seventh-grade-summer feeling.

But god, he’s hungry. And tired. And this talk has been thirty years in the making – it can wait a few hours more, long enough for everyone to grab some food and hit the showers, and put these kids back where they belong. Long enough for Eddie to disinfect himself back at the townhouse.

And besides, Richie has this growing feeling that for once in his life, he probably already knows what’s going to be said.

**Author's Note:**

> hope this helps y'all get to sleep at night lmao, god knows I'm still trying to


End file.
